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InstallingVmwareTools

this short piece will cover how to install Vmware Tools onto a virtual machine which may result in lower CPU utilization and better interactive response for the host machine when vms are booted.

This tutorial uses an unmodified virtual machine from www.cucat.org however modified ones should also work and might already contain some of the needed packages. You'll need to boot the vm and get access to it documented elsewhere via ssh and become the superuser or use sudo. Remember credentials for Cavi machines are username noddy and password user

You want the latest kernel set to work with virtual machines. execute the following as root:

 apt-get update

apt-get install linux-image-virtual

linux-image-virtual is a meta-package that pulls in the latest kernel known to work well with virtualization systems such as Vmware and KVM.

now reboot the box so you are running the latest kernel, you can check this by running

 uname -a

before and after the reboot.

You'll need to find and utilize the install vmware tools option in either player or server. This won't actually install the tools for Linux it'll just attach the iso containing them to the virtual image so you can manually do the rest.

Now you'll need to mount the iso somewhere so

 mount -r /dev/scd0 /cdrom

Now things get messy. you'll need to unpack the tar.gz with something like the following:

 cd /usr/local/src
 tar xf /cdrom/V<tab>

This just just unpacks the tar, we now need a development environment and kernel headers to build the modules against.

 apt-get install build-essential

 apt-get install linux-headers-virtual

now

 cd /usr/local/src/vmware-tools-distrib
 ./vmware-install.pl

select the defaults for all the options there is no need to change any of them at this time. Now once this is done you can actually run the vmware-config-tools.pl script or let the install script run it for you. Once all the modules are compiled you can

 cd ..
 rm -rf vmware-distrib

whenever you upgrade the kernel you need to rerun

 vmware-config-tools.pl

as the superuser to rebuild the modules for the new kernel.

reboot the box to get the new faster networking drivers and VMCI support. The tools improve interaction between the guest and host operating systems. They provide some modules for the running kernel in the guest to allow it to be friendlier on system resources. the vmem module allows a guest to return memory it is not using to the host when this is possible. the Vmware network driver uses shared memory to more efficiently transfer packets between the virtual machine and host networking stack.

There are a number of options that can be set with the vmware-toolbox-cmd utility that will turn on and off time synchronization between guest and host and change other options. Consult the vmware tools documentation for details.